Biographer Jesse Fink On AC/DC’s Questionable Business Decisions

When it comes to biographies on musicians, particularly ones about bona fide Rock Gods, negative moments can at times get glossed over in favor of not tarnishing a legend’s image.

In The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC, however, author Jesse Fink doesn’t hide the fact that Angus and Malcolm Young may have been involved with some questionable business moves that involved stepping on a few toes along the way.

Speaking withWDHA’s Morning Jolt, Fink details one move in particular that is a gut-wrenching tale of multi-million dollar proportions:

“I think really what emerged in the process of kind of writing a book and certainly looking at the business-side of the AC/DC story is that these guys are fairly ruthless. You know, there were a lot of people who were extremely important to the band who helped the band at very critical points who have effectively been forgotten by the band…There are a lot of people who feel aggrieved at how they’ve been treated. And certainly one of them was Gerard Huerta who was this logo designer who came up with the amazing logo you see today. He designed that for one album, and AC/DC went away and used another logo for ‘Powerage’ and then came back to this logo, and they’ve used it on everything ever since. It’s on everything! There’s actually an appendix in the book of all the products that AC/DC have registered this logo for and it makes them hundreds of millions of dollars. The thing is the designer of the logo itself actually has never gotten a royalty for that logo.”

An excerpt from Fink’s book found on BRW.com goes on to clarify that Huerta may have gotten jobbed out of millions by Atlantic Records, not necessarily Angus and Malcolm themselves, but this account really serves as a reminder that for every glamorous rock and roll tale, there is an equally dark, merciless one.